by Shawn Doyle
If you want great results, you need to work on being a great manager. Now.
You start a business, and your business becomes successful, and your business grows.
Then, you have to hire employees, and then suddenly you go from being a business owner to being, almost overnight, a leader and manager. This creates some challenges.
Here are seven daily practices that managers need to stop doing now.
1. Not being careful enough in hiring.
There’s no question that the quality of your organization is in direct correlation to the quality of the people that you hire. As a consultant and a professional speaker, I see many people who do not have a comprehensive and selective interviewing process.
Be very careful to have an interview process, which includes multiple interviews with multiple people, and be very careful about the criteria you use to decide who to hire.
2. Only telling people when they do something wrong.
When I was a Vice President in corporate America, every time I would meet with someone they would ask me what was wrong. I would then explain to them that nothing was wrong, that I just wanted to talk.
I realized that their only context with management was having conversations when they were in trouble, never when they were doing something right. It is critically important to give people feedback on what they’re doing well (maybe more important) just as much as what they’re doing that needs to be improved.
3. Not providing proper training and orientation for employees.
Every one of us at some point has gone to work for a company, and when we started we were basically told to follow someone else around for a week and they would “show us the ropes”. Far too often we throw people from the frying pan into the fire and expect them to succeed.
Invest the time with every new employee–give them an eight-week orientation calendar that outlines what they’re going to be doing in the first two months.
4. Not finding out what people’s goals and objectives are.
I believe every employee in the company should sit down and have a discussion with their manager once a year to find out what their goals are short-term, mid-term, and long-term.
Everyone in the organization should have an individual development plan, designed by them and their manager, in order to help them get where they want to go in terms of their career. It is a great way to build morale.
5. Not treating people with respect.
Everyone in the organization, from the lowest level employee and up, deserves to be treated with respect and dignity. The old ways of the yelling, screaming boss are over, and we need to treat people as valued team members and not just as front-line employees.
When you give respect to get it back tenfold, and you build a team of people that are loyal to you.
6. Not defining your company culture.
I believe that company cultures either happen by accident or are created by the leader of the organization. So the question is: Do you have a mission and vision statement? Do you have a list of values? Does everyone know them? Do you talk about them with the team?
7. Lack of communication.
Unfortunately, many employees often say that they find out what is happening in the company on the Internet before they hear about it themselves.
It is your job and your management team’s job to communicate with employees on a regular and consistent basis to let them know what is going on in the company, where you are headed, and what the goals and objectives are. One way of doing this is to have regularly scheduled employee meetings to keep everybody informed.
I challenge you to review this list and decide where your strengths are and where you need to improve, and then get started today. I guarantee you will massively improve morale and productivity if you do them all well.
Shawn Doyle is a certified professional speaker with the CSP designation. “My life passion is to make a positive difference in people’s lives by helping them live to their full potential both at work and at home,“ he says. Shawn has spent almost three decades in the world of personal and professional development, and from 2000- 2003, co-founded a Corporate University for Comcast where he was Vice President of Learning and Development. His clients include Pfizer, Zippo, Comcast, Lockheed Martin, NBC, Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Guidepost, ABC, Disney, Kraft, the U.S. Marines, Charter, The Ladders and IBM. Shawn is the author of Jumpstart Your Productivity and Jumpstart Your Motivation.